Well, I must disagree here. First of all: Please take it just as my opinion, which are like *******s, not as critisism - at the end it is YOUR GB, you are tha master, GBs are no democracy, and I highly admit your work (and that of all the other GB runners which are constantly deliver incredible work). This said and done, I would give you my opinion: Another, european based vendor has never been tried, as far as I know. But it works with other vendors beside MD, and monoplos suck ass. And I would asume that something like the price drop models would not be the issue here. Either one would combine two vendors or one would go stritly EU - and lets face it, this would be far below the 500+ range, so a price drop would never occur anyway. Current european based vendor prices (directly at GMK, private GBs in the past, candykeys, ...) show that MD is making these kits quite expensive. You can stay way below the 200+ price tag that a full blown kit is given...
Again, just my opinion. Yeah, MD has advantages. But these advantages are paid for.